Vaudeville and spiritual quest, ethereal but familiar, populated with moms who are also queens and birds who are also men, spaces aglow with fires that instantaneously flood with water, Mozart’s Enlightenment masterpiece touches our hearts by presenting the panoply of human possibility.

In subject matter and form, the opera is about integrating these disparate parts into a whole. At the start of the piece, every character misses a part of her/himself, to varyingly comic degrees. The three ladies attempt to fill the gap with the unconscious Tamino, Papageno looks to the skies to find a catch, and Tamino’s love for Pamina makes her portrait vital. This sense of finding a double or a partner runs throughout the piece. For example, Sarastro has two doubles: the Queen of the Night and Monostatos. There are two suicide scenes. Two groups of people—Sarastro’s priests and the three Spirits—disseminate knowledge in two drastically different ways. The temple goers edify and moralize; the Spirits are playful, irreverent, and elusive.

I started with certain instincts about the piece, which I have loved since before I had the cognitive ability to know why I loved it. I knew I wanted it to be simple and elegant, in the same way as I hear the music. I also knew that I wanted the costumes to expose, rather than hide, the humanity of each character. I wanted to see the Queen and Sarastro struggle with their problems, to divest them of golden robes and mountainous headdresses. The designers and I took inspiration from the bird and planetary imagery in Joseph Cornell’s boxes, Joseph Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey, and Karl Jung’s alchemical images from Edward Edinger’s book Mystery of the Coniunctio. The space is loosely based on research about Masonic lodges in New England, and the natural elements we portray come from that region as well.

This particular Die Zauberflöte considers Pamina and Tamino to be two halves of a whole, enlightened person. At the beginning of the piece, a system of discrete opposites is breaking down; the first words of the opera are “help me!” Through their journey, our heroes become whole by individuating from their pasts and integrating all the different lessons they learn along the way. At the end, they find a new wholeness: in a sophisticated other, as in the case of Pamina and Tamino, or, more naively, by just looking in the mirror like Papageno and Papagena. Papagena echoes the birdcatcher's every desire, changing only a vowel here and there.

At polar opposites in the piece are the Queen of the Night and Sarastro, who serve as two examples of how to make your way in the world. Each has his/her virtues: Sarastro is hierarchical, rational, codified, and rigorous, the Queen of the Night is wild, passionate, and mysterious. For Pamina to truly grow, she has to borrow from both of her elders and integrate the type of female power that prizes intuition over rationality without dispensing with reason altogether. If she continued to color within the lines, she would never break into the final trial and lead the way through the elements.

Our idea of Enlightenment is very different from Mozart’s Enlightenment, when it was revolutionary just to posit that a (educated white) man could attain an equal rational footing with God and King. In 2016, there’s room for female and male, for light and dark—there’s room to unify and embrace the contradictions that shape human experience, and there’s room for the messiness and emotion that those contradictions give way to.

I’ll close with one of my favorite conversations about the piece from our rehearsal process. A member of our cast pointed out, “What’s so bad about the Queen of the Night being banished to the night? That’s what she loves and that’s where she lives anyway. After all, she’s the Queen of it.” There is much more to say and yet, of all operas, Die Zauberflöte completely speaks for itself.

The Rape of Lucretia

Juilliard, February 2015

Conductor: Mark Shapiro

Set: Grace Laubacher

Lighting: Anshuman Bhatia

Costumes: Sydney Maresca

Choreography: Adam Cates

Eugene Onegin

This was a chamber version of Onegin, for 9 singers and a twelve-piece orchestra. We cut the act 1 women’s chorus, much of the interstitial music, and combined the characters of Mme Larina and Filipyevna. Following Tchaikovsky’s lead, we became fascinated by Tatiana and the story through her eyes.

At the beginning of the piece, we are introduced to a childlike, unconscious Tatyana. In her perception, edges are blurry, objects are undifferentiated, and the world is open to her, full of possibility. Fiction is her reality and her secret imagination is colorful and obsessive. We found a visual analogy to her fluid, epic internal life: the way the painters of Pushkin’s period (1800-1850)– specifically Turner, Caspar David Friedrich, and Constable– used light in their landscapes and skyscapes. These paintings magnify, “Romanticize”, and externalize emotions that are intimate, internal and private.

Romantic painting continues to inform 21st century visual expression. On Instagram, we ‘filter’ photographs to make them emotionally evocative. We manipulate their light and color to render a situation more dramatic than it actually is. Teenage Tatyana filters her world– seeing in Onegin the mysterious glow of depth and passion, and in Olga and Lensky a vintage idyllic love. Our production is based on this idea of filtering, to allow you to feel the dreamy quality of her interior life.

When Tatyana is rejected by Onegin, her world starts to change. When we meet her again, in Act 2, her internal world has developed edges and become defined. She has made clear choices and set up distinct boundaries. Her chosen path would seem to make rejecting Onegin’s declaration of love easy. But unfortunately, Tatyana’s mature choice is even more painful because it’s permanent and limiting, as all grown-up choices are. At the end of Onegin¸ it is not a character we are left to mourn, but Tatyana’s youth.

Photos by: Richard Termine

Il Barbiere di Siviglia

Beginning of Ecco Ridente

...Baby No More Times

Female pop sensation BABYNOMORETIMES returns to NYC for a sold-out concert to celebrate their latest album skyrocketing to #1 on the charts. Join them for an evening of sexy, raucous girl power as the divas fill the 90's pop formula with the real stuff in American women's hearts and minds (pay inequality, body shame, the blessing of the vibrator). Bring your best friends and your best whistle-tone; this show will make you twerk and think.

Le donne curiose

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari was born in 1876 to a German painter father, and Venetian mother, and despite spending most of his adult life in Germany, considered himself an Italian composer. At 19, he hyphenated his own last name, one suspects, due to that pride in his heritage. It is no surprise then, that his first successes as a composer were his musicalizations of the plays of Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793.) Goldoni, a Venetian and a great writer of the Italian commedia dell’arte, pioneered changes in the form. At the beginning of his career, all of the characters were masked and outlandish. By the end, none of the actors wore masks, and one couldn’t distinguish the stock commedia characters from the members of the bourgeoisie that Goldoni had created. Goldoni was fascinated with the minutiae of these people's lives, and explored their emotions with a prolific pen; Le Donne Curiose was written and performed in 1753 - a year after his similarly named but distinct Le Donne Gelose. Wolf-Ferrari’s rise in the Verismo movement cemented these thematic similarities. His operas were about the real life and emotions of a group of Italians. In Le Donne Curiose (1903), the commedia characters set the Venetian tone, but blend in with the bourgeois people (with their bourgeois concerns) that are at the center of Wolf-Ferrari’s opera.

Goldoni, like many great playwrights, was a radical and championed social equality through comedy– his servants are always craftier than their masters, the women often smarter than the men they took up with. The fundamental story of Le Donne Curiose is as old as Adam and Eve. Women get curious about their loved ones' lives, and in the process, destroy something (and some might argue, begin to build something much greater -- certainly more real.) The designers and I resisted relegating this piece to the past, intent on making the male-female relationships real and not giving into potential over-the-top silliness of the characters. Our Venetian Men’s Club is contemporary and very alive—just check the Man Cave aisle of your local supermarket.

The other strain of the piece that captivated us was the unlimited capability of the human imagination. Each idea the women come up with for what the men could possibly be doing is more ridiculous than the last – gambling, whoring, searching for the philosopher’s stone? That made Grace Laubacher, the set designer, and I wonder about the possibilities of occlusion and perspective. What if we put the audience in the position of the Donne--- always trying to discover what lies behind, underneath, and at the heart of the issue.

Beatrice tries to shake the truth out of Eleonora. Are the men doing Alchemy?

Columbina "accidentally" spills coffee on Ottavio's jacket. On SL we see the action under a magnifying glass.

Pantalone yells at Arlecchino.

Rosaura pretends to faint (at Columbina's prompting) in order to get the men's secret out of Florindo.

Florindo stands outside of Rosaura's window.

Pantalone and Arlecchino admire the gondolas in "blessed Venezia".

The Donne spy on the Men's club dinner from the skylight on the roof.

Rosaura apologizes to Florindo. Columbina seduces Arlecchino, and Pantalone bemoans the women's admission to the club.

La finta giardiniera

Digging into the outlandish, passionate, violently comic world of La Finta Giardiniera is an undertaking. Finta, Mozart’s fourth operatic effort (at age 18), is his first real struggle with darker themes – obsessive love, jealousy and madness. In tackling this dramaturgical challenge we tried not to be led up garden path, seduced by the darkness in the backstory. Instead we were inspired by the levity and effervescence of Mozart’s music, the tunes that made Finta a big success when it was first produced.

In the dizzying fluctuations of narrative, one thing is clear – everyone wants something he or she can’t have. Frustrations run throughout, thwarting communication; none of the characters say what they mean, and when they attempt to, they renege almost immediately. Only Arminda is unabashedly herself – Sandrina and Nardo are incognito, the Podesta is having an affair with Serpetta while professing his love for Sandrina, Serpetta leads Nardo on when she actually lusts after the Podesta. Ramiro and the Count are all over the place – hot one minute, cold the next –though supposedly in love.

In cultivating the world of Finta, the ingenious set designer Grace Laubacher and I decided to root our production in the relationship of appearance to reality, facade (2 dimensional) to depth (3 dimensional.) We asked ourselves the question: how can a garden exist in more dimensions than the obvious? Hence, a hanging garden served as a canopy for the action. The doubling of parts underline these dueling concepts. When the emotion runs deeper, multiple facets of the character appear through our literal use of multiple faces. To weed out confusion, we asked brilliant playwright christopher oscar peña to write two spoken scenes in English. His additions flesh out characters and provide more backstory.

Arminda tells the Count Belfiore the terms of her marriage contract.

Everyone is reunited with their exes, and confused!

Count Belfiore is surrounded by two Sandrinas!

Sandrina confronts her fear in the forest, and ends up reunited with the Count.

Ramiro confronts Arminda. "I want you!"

The morning after. Played by 4 performers - 2 playing the upper bodies, and 2 playing the feet. A duet a quatre.

Santa Fe Apprentice Scenes

Photo credit: Kate Russell

Pictures from:

1) Die Schweigsame Frau by Strauss

2) Crossing by Matt Aucoin

3) Die Meistersinger by Wagner

4) Les Contes d'Hoffman by Offenbach

Down In The Valley

Spring 2011 at the Juilliard School

On its lovingly embroidered surface, Down in the Valley seems simple. The tale of naive youths whose budding romance is thwarted by a dissolute father figure and his insurmountable debt, Kurt Weill's "American opera" is intended to be unpretentious and accessible. However, its origins render the piece more complex. Weill, of course, was not born American, and librettist Arnold Sundgaard was a first generation American born to immigrant (Norwegian) parents. They began to write Down in the Valley in 1945 in an effort to celebrate the American experience by proving that it, too, was worthy of an opera composed of indigenous music - five Appalachian folksongs make up the score. Weill had emigrated from Austria because of increasingly prohibitive anti-semitism, and in Down in theValley, he created a landscape as expansive and passionate as he felt his beloved adopted country could be. The result represents an outsider's "America", one that perhaps never existed. In Spring 2011, we can all feel lucky to spend an hour in this country - fictional or no.

Synopsis:

Told mostly in flashback, Down in the Valley is the story of Jennie Parsons and Brack Weaver; two Birmingham teenagers who fall in love - or at least in lust. Unfortunately, Jennie's father is in crippling debt, and goes into "business" with Thomas Bouche, who, in return, asks to be set up with Jennie. Defying her father's orders, Jennie goes to a barn dance with Brack; Bouche shows up (with a knife!) and a skirmish ensues. Brack stabs Bouche and is imprisoned and sentenced to death for his crime.

Brack and Jenny together at the Barn dance.

The preacher leads the church service.

The leader holds Jenny back as Brack and ____ fight.

The fight.

Brack and Jenny mourn their lost love in their final hours before Brack gets hanged. (The crowd waits for the execution.)

Nonsense Songs + 3 Sisters Who Are Not Sisters

Summer 2012 at The Opera Studio, Melbourne

When Linda Thompson suggested a double bill of Three Sisters and Nonsense songs, I thought that it would be a delightful afternoon at the Opera Studio. As we started rehearsal, it became more and more clearer that the pieces are deeply tied, thematically and compositionally. Both are efforts from male-female partnerships (Ned Rorem and Gertrude Stein, Liza Lehmann and Lewis Carroll) that deal with the logic of the impossible, the act of pretend. Both Stein and Carroll struggled with societal norms and lived part of their lives in “secret”– Stein as a lesbian expatriate, Carroll as recluse–which probably played a part in how each wrestled with the violence of logic – how the truth can exist and not exist.

Each composer approaches the problem of sense in a different way. Rorem sets Stein’s stripped, contradictory prose to very stark, serious music. Textual syllogisms come out as proclamations: “I am not dead! I am an orphan!” Helen sings.

Lehmann, however, illustrates Carroll’s visual imagination with settings that contrast in style. The Nonsense Songs contain Gilbert and Sullivan-esque pastiche, a waltz, and a couple ballads worthy of the popular musical theater or burlesque of the day.

As we interpreted these two pieces, we warred with sense, meaning and style. The result is staging and design that mirrors the music of each piece—seriously funny and deadly committed for the Rorem, and extravagantly silly and outlandishly impossible for the Lehmann. The two together add up to a treatise on the power of play and the imagination and the sense that can be found in the invisible (music.) As the King of Hearts says in one of the Nonsense Songs, “If there’s no meaning in it, it saves a world of trouble. Yet, I seem to see some meaning after all!”

Schooled (or m. moliere's the learned ladies)

February 2009 @ different apartments around NYC

This February, SCHOOLED gets right to the heart of Moliere's "The Learned Ladies" by inviting a small audience into a chic New York apartment over Valentine's Day weekend. Inspired by the early films of Brigitte Bardot, French pop music of the 1960s and Parisian Salon culture, SCHOOLED will be plop art: created entirely in a rehearsal room and 'plopped' in a different apartment for each performance. Equal parts voyeuristic salon party and hilarious satire, SCHOOLED is the story of a family's struggle to save themselves, and their home, from their warring ideals.

Founded in fall 2008, art.party.theater.company strives to create accessible, generous, physical performance with a methodology based on community building, spatial sensitivity, and irreverence.

SCHOOLED/Duchess in the Dark

STARBOX

Summer 2010 @ Bryant Park

From NY Daily News:

A mysterious 8-by-8-foot shiny box is coming to Bryant Park next week - and a star may be inside.

The folks at art.party.theater.company are betting New Yorkers will line up to meet a secret celebrity inside the Mylar-covered "Starbox" on the park's fountain terrace, starting Friday.

Birnbaum and her cohorts hope to create a celeb-crazed stampede - about 30 performers will play scripted agents, personal assistants and star-struck fans to build the hype. There will be a red carpet. And velvet ropes.

While organizers promise there will be a real celeb inside the box, they won't guarantee which list the star is on: A, B, C, D or even Z.

Could it be Beyoncé? Justin Bieber? Or someone less, um, current, like Scott Baio? Those behind the box already are building buzz, tweeting with tongue in cheek.

"Awesome! I heard that @bryantparknyc is hosting #starbox July 2-3/30 and August 6/13! I saw it in Sydney last year and met Hugh Jackman!"

And: "woke up late. but i hear that lindsay has requested only blue pretzel m&m's for her stay inside #starbox."

The performance is about hope as much as it is about hype, say members of the troupe, who also invaded Bryant Park last summer to play croquet in bright white outfits and quote the park's poet namesake, William Cullen Bryant.

And even if it is all smoke and mirrors, organizers have devised a way to keep people coming to the Starbox, which will be open from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. every Friday through Aug. 13.

Birnbaum would not comment on exactly how big a star the box dweller will be.

Before guests enter the box, they'll be required to sign a non-disclosure release.

From NY Mag:

If the performance troupe art.party.theater.company is to be believed, an eight-by-eight-foot box will show up in Bryant Park this Friday, and in that box will be a famous person. This famous person will sit in the box from between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m., on every Friday from July 23 to August 13, and will be viewable to all those who show up and are willing to sign a nondisclosure form. As we see it, inside the box will either be: (a) an individual who is technically famous but in no way fulfills the layperson's understanding of the word celebrity, (b) the punch line to a potentially amusing/terrible joke, or (c) David Blaine (please don't be David Blaine). Okay, care to guess which "celebrity" may in fact be in the box?

Starbox in Bryant Park NYC who's in there?

Duchess in the Dark

Art.party.theater.company's Duchess in the Dark is a slimmed-down adaptation of John Webster's seminal revenge tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi(1613), deftly cut and directed by artistic director Mary Birnbaum. Exemplary of Jacobean revenge plays, Malfi tells the bloody story of the recently widowed titular Duchess (played with wonderful confidence and subtlety by Julia Gwynne) and her ill-fated love with a court steward, Antonio. Her brothers, wanting to protect their claim to the inheritance and driven by incestuous jealousy of their sister's suitor, concoct a series of elaborate schemes that start with spying, escalate to murder, and end up destroying most everyone involved in a bloodbath ending typical of the genre. Also there is a werewolf—I love Jacobean drama.

Birnbaum's edit shaves the original cast of 15 characters down to a lighter and more nimble eight by cutting down on the extraneous subplots while maintaining the essential core. Her direction is similarly sharp, drawing noticeably and to good effect upon the Lecoq training that she and many of her actors have to correctly underscore the play's archaic language with a vibrant and violent physicality. Though many little directorial gestures and conventions are at play (more on that below), they all fit together into a cohesive and well-built system that never succumbs to the surplus of clever ideas that plagues so much avant garde work. Chris Rummel's sound design compliments Birnbaum's physical world with an atmospheric soundscape that is both familiar and unsettling. Apart from Gwynne's expertly-played Duchess, the performances are generally just competent, though tending a little unfortunately towards some of the more obvious conventions of melodrama (gravelly-voiced villainy and a lot of yelling).

The primary point of interest for the show, however, is its unconventional lighting design. Every member of the audience is handed a flashlight, and after the first 20 or so minutes of the show, all illumination comes from the audience. However intellectually intrigued by the idea of such a tangible analog for the audience's aggregate attention, I was wary of how it might work in practice. Fortunately, my fears were allayed, and this aspect of the show largely worked quite well. With a reasonably full house, the show was never under-lit, and there was enough variety in the particular uses of the convention to keep it from becoming too gimmicky. The aesthetic result was unique and engaging, and felt appropriate to the dark and paranoid world of the play.

It was also fascinating to watch the audience as a collective get better at their job of lighting the show over its course. By the play's grisly conclusion response times to entrances were virtually instantaneous and actors remained appropriately lit on fast and unexpected crosses. When someone dropped an object on the ground, a handful of lights would deviate from the main masses immediately to highlight it. Although performing a 17th century play with early 20th century technology, the effect resonated powerfully with the 21st century's technically-mediated collective action and the surprisingly nuanced intelligence that can emerge. Furthermore, although I happen to enjoy audience participation, many people very actively do not, and this was a perfect solution for them. It provided the thrill of engagement without the personal implication or embarrassment that can accompany participatory work.

While the storytelling becomes a little choppy towards the end as it devolves into confusing fits of yelling and fighting, that is not entirely atypical of Jacobean revenge tragedies, which serve as an important foundation for many current forms of popular storytelling. Moreover, these structural weaknesses can be forgiven on account of the show's well-executed innovation with the lights. After receiving a lot of public attention over the summer for their Bryant in the Park, art.party has begun to make a name for itself as a young company with a taste for smart and generous experimentation in form. Similarly, Flux Factory, the interdisciplinary arts warehouse space that is hosting them, is doing a wonderful job along with spaces like the Brick or the nearby Chocolate Factory in building a new and established home for such work after the Avant Garde Diaspora caused by rising real estate prices in downtown Manhattan. If work like this is indicative of things to come, then I for one am feeling confident about theatre's continued survival and relevance in an increasingly digital world.